Imagine yourself in the gallery watching the Senate open for business. The day begins with a prayer from the Rev. Adm. Barry Black, a Seventh-Day Adventist pastor and the Senate’s current chaplain. Black, as is his custom, suggests none too delicately that God would like the Senate to get off the dime.

Most of us are not Adventists, but the odds are that, even if you would have preferred not to hear the prayer, you don’t feel your immortal soul, or even your dignity, has been compromised. You’re here to watch the Senate do business, and, for good or ill, this is how they do it.

Now imagine, on the other hand, that you get to the DMV window, and the clerk says, “Will you bow your head in prayer to Jesus Christ?”

What do you do? What if you were told to bow at the Zoning Commission office, or before a job interview or a promotion board? No one is going to put you in jail or fine you if you don’t join in—but wouldn’t you feel you would be better off if you got aboard the Salvation Express?

On November 6, the Supreme Court will need to decide whether a Town Council meeting—which passes ordinances, grants zoning variances, hears employee grievances, and decides on police promotions—is more like the Senate or the Division of Motor Vehicles.

On November 6, the Supreme Court will need to decide whether a Town Council meeting is more like the Senate or the Division of Motor Vehicles.

The story of Town of Greece v. Galloway begins in 1999, in the thriving hamlet of Greece, N. (pop. 96,000) just outside Rochester. Until then, the Greece Town Council had opened its monthly meetings with a moment of silence. But that didn’t satisfy newly elected Supervisor John T. Auberger, who wanted prayer, by God. At first he led the prayers himself; then the Council began inviting local clergy to give prayers. Over the 13-year period of Greece’s evangelizing mission, all of those praying but three have been Christian ministers. (The town says it has always been its policy to allow anyone to open the meeting if they asked; but that policy seems to have been secret, and town officials made the calls to clergy, asking them to come and pray.) Many of the clergy giving the invocation asked the audience to bow their heads, called on Jesus Christ, led a group recital of the Lord’s Prayer, or asked the audience to say “Amen.”

The audience was completely free to walk out, look at the ceiling, or stick their fingers in their ears and yell “No one’s listening to you!” That is, they were not subject to being jailed or fined. Whether you’d feel “free” in those circumstances may, in fact, be the central question in the case.

Here’s how lawyers for the Town of Greece put it in their brief: “As understood by the Framers, government ‘established’ religion either by compelling the payment of taxes to support a favored religion or by compelling obedience to the tenets of a particular faith.” Asking people to pray while you ponder their zoning variance thus isn’t a problem—unless you ask for money up front, or tell them to say ten Our Fathers and ask again.

Religious conservatives have been promoting the “coercion” test for nearly a generation. In 1992, they seemed posed for victory. Lee v. Weisman concerned a local high-school graduation ceremony, with a Rabbi invited to give an elaborate invocation asking God’s blessings on the graduates. No one was asked to join in, and there was no reference to any particular denomination of Christianity or Judaism. So confident were the “coercion” advocates that the School Board’s lawyer told the Court that a state government could constitutionally set up an official state religion, as long as it was “purely noncoercive.”

In the Court’s opinion, though, Justice Anthony Kennedy broadened the “coercion” test. The graduates were young, the ceremony was a special day, and public and peer pressure to participate “can be as real as any overt compulsion.” The invocation thus violated the Establishment Clause, he wrote. This angered Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote that the Clause was on violated by “coercion of religious orthodoxy and of financial support by force of law and threat of penalty.”

But Scalia added an important qualification. Public prayer, he wrote, is okay as long as it is not “sectarian, in the sense of specifying details upon which men and women who believe in a benevolent, omnipotent Creator and Ruler of the world, are known to differ (for example, the divinity of Christ).”

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There is no such reservation here. The Christian invokers in Greece were determinedly, almost pugnaciously, “sectarian.” In fact, when the plaintiffs in this case first complained, the Council stood by while an invited invoker told God that “they are in the minority, and they are ignorant of the history of our country.”

Thus the Town will, and should, lose--unless the Court holds that the prayers are not directed at the audience, but are instead like Admiral Black’s homilies before the Senate. The Court has upheld “legislative prayer” before meetings of bodies like the Senate or a state legislature. In qualify, the prayers would have to be seen as the Council talking to itself, not the ministers talking to the audience. In this case, that seems like a stretch.

The Court is faced with unappetizing choices in this case. Its caselaw makes clear that state legislative bodies can open with prayer; but Lee v. Weisman suggests that local government can’t put pressure on people to participate, even passively. Even Justice Scalia has said that there can’t be “sectarian” prayers; but the cases also make clear that government can’t review, censor, or prescribe prayers—even to the extent of giving clergy a little brochure on how to make prayers “nonsectarian.”

It will be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for the Court to negotiate this dispute without making things worse.

Until 1999, Grecians were at peace, with a “moment of silence” that accommodated believers without pressing infidels to do anything. The aggressive faith of Supervisor Auberger has brought us to this pass ,where anything the Court does could put another crack in the fragile religious peace we have forged since the adoption of the First Amendment in 1791.

In David Lean’s film Lawrence of Arabia, Prince Feisal (played by Alec Guinness) explains to a reporter the difference between him and Major T.E. Lawrence (Peter O’Toole): “With Major Lawrence, mercy is a passion: with me it is merely good manners. You may judge which motive is the more reliable.”

In no area more than this is passion an unreliable guide. If Supervisor Auberger and his cohorts had a shred of manners, we and the Court would not be in this mess.

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Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

The new version of Apple’s signature media software is a mess. What are people with large MP3 libraries to do?

When the developer Erik Kemp designed the first metadata system for MP3s in 1996, he provided only three options for attaching text to the music. Every audio file could be labeled with only an artist, song name, and album title.

Kemp’s system has since been augmented and improved upon, but never replaced. Which makes sense: Like the web itself, his schema was shipped, good enough,and an improvement on the vacuum which preceded it. Those three big tags, as they’re called, work well with pop and rock written between 1960 and 1995. This didn’t prevent rampant mislabeling in the early days of the web, though, as anyone who remembers Napster can tell you. His system stumbles even more, though, when it needs to capture hip hop’s tradition of guest MCs or jazz’s vibrant culture of studio musicianship.

A controversial treatment shows promise, especially for victims of trauma.

It’s straight out of a cartoon about hypnosis: A black-cloaked charlatan swings a pendulum in front of a patient, who dutifully watches and ping-pongs his eyes in turn. (This might be chased with the intonation, “You are getting sleeeeeepy...”)

Unlike most stereotypical images of mind alteration—“Psychiatric help, 5 cents” anyone?—this one is real. An obscure type of therapy known as EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is gaining ground as a potential treatment for people who have experienced severe forms of trauma.

Here’s the idea: The person is told to focus on the troubling image or negative thought while simultaneously moving his or her eyes back and forth. To prompt this, the therapist might move his fingers from side to side, or he might use a tapping or waving of a wand. The patient is told to let her mind go blank and notice whatever sensations might come to mind. These steps are repeated throughout the session.